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krou writes "Recent results from the Dzero experiment at the Tevatron particle accelerator suggest that those looking for a single Higgs boson particle should be looking for five particles, and the data gathered may point to new laws beyond the Standard Model. 'The DZero results showed much more significant "asymmetry" of matter and anti-matter — beyond what could be explained by the Standard Model. Bogdan Dobrescu, Adam Martin and Patrick J Fox from Fermilab say this large asymmetry effect can be accounted for by the existence of multiple Higgs bosons. They say the data point to five Higgs bosons with similar masses but different electric charges. Three would have a neutral charge and one each would have a negative and positive electric charge. This is known as the two-Higgs doublet model.'" There's more detail in this writeup from Symmetry Magazine, a joint publication of SLAC and Fermilab. Here's the paper on the arXiv.

These particular scientists (or rather all the employees there) let us motorcycle riders cruise around the facility surrounding the Tevatron whenever we want, and never greet us with anything but smiles and friendly conversation. Even when a bunch of biker looking guys decide to stop in and press our faces to the glass at the Fermi+CERN room or pull off on one of the access roads to take photographs of their small herd of bison, the many tanker trucks marked "Liquid Nitrogen" in big letters, or one of their many bizarre looking buildings (even the ones with the little radioactive signs on them). It's particularly amazing how open they are with unsupervised visitors given the ridiculous "fear of teh turrorists" mentality that's so prevalent now. In my mind, they really can do no wrong. I hope the ridiculously smart people there find whatever it is they're looking for... it's just a shame I'm too dumb to understand their work.

I had a similar experience when I visited CERN. Granted it wasn't a spontaneous trip (was arranged as part of a particle physics course), but when being shown around it was repeated over and over that we can go anywhere we want (but that it's not a good idea to enter radioactive or cryogenically frozen areas, of course), we can take photos of anything, etc. This is because 1) it's a place of research, so nobody should be discouraged from researching CERN itself 2) due to the politics involved, no participating country has authority to stop people from any other participating country from doing anything they want 3) it's publicly funded, so should be available to the public and 4) it lowers worries about clandestine weaponisation of the technology they have (especially since the word Nuclear crops up a lot).

I'm guessing that this won't reassure them. "So, our big machine discovered some weird stuff, that we'll need to build two bigger machines to investigate in proper detail. I'm sure that neither of those will repeat this process..."

Outside of people informed enough to oppose particular scientific projects as being ill-conceived compared to other ones, support for, or opposition to, research projects is pretty much an ideological matter. People who support science as an end will be dissuaded only by the most grindingly uninteresting streaks of purely negative results. People who oppose it(or who rank it very low compared to other ends) will be appeased by only results that are trivially applicable to whatever they do care about. If, for example, one of these Higgs particles could be commercialized as a cure for male-pattern baldness or a source of HDTVs within the next two years...

> If, for example, one of these Higgs particles could be commercialized as a> cure for male-pattern baldness or a source of HDTVs within the next two> years...

No. What would guarantee generous funding for the next 65 years would be the development of a successor to nuclear weapons (anti-matter bombs, for example). You have to address the primary interest of those who control the money: killing people.

At this point in time, I'd question whether they would fund anti matter weapons research. Tactically, do we really need a bigger boom than a nuke? I'd also imagine that anti-matter weapons would leave some nasty side effects hanging around after detonation.

As to the size of the explosion, it is not a good thing to leave a smoking crater where your enemy used to be. You actually want to kill/turn any resistance, and then acquire resources and spoils of war. Secondly, it would be quite pointless to make a b

I'd also imagine that anti-matter weapons would leave some nasty side effects hanging around after detonation.

That's one of the more interesting aspects of anti-matter weaponry. The entire concept is that there isn't anything of the bomb hanging around after detonation. This is of course, assuming the basic concept of an anti-matter 'bomb' in which matter and an equal portion of anti-matter are combined and in the process annihilated.

I'm not sure that the people with cash would really want an even more nuclear than nuclear option floating around...

Being the only kid on the block with nukes has its perks; but that state lasted for about 20 minutes, back in the late 40's. Since then, anybody who has them has to contend with the fact that, if they actually do anything, pretty much everybody else will freak out and glass them. This has virtually obviated the theoretical killing potential. From their invention to the present, nukes probably trail machetes(never mind Kalashnikovs and assorted knockoffs) in terms of body count. You still have to have a collection of them on the mantle, kept polished and dusted, if you want to be part of the great powers club; but you don't actually get to use them, and you can't really stop uncouth little upstarts from collecting their own. Worse, you have to deal with the fact that, although you cannot use them, non-state, covert, or just plain nihilistic actors can. Back when you could be pretty certain that only real countries had nukes, you could rely on MAD. If some nutjob, or untraceable tool of somebody's intelligence apparatus goes and blows up something expensive, the incumbents lose, and don't have any good way of retaliating.

Some sort of uber-nuke super-superweapon would, at best, bring you back to the late 40's situation(minus the enviable economic position of being the only major industrialized nation not squatting in a pile of its own rubble). At worst, it would just antagonize the other nuclear powers.

There will certainly always be money to keep the existing stock dusted and polished, and react to any threats to its efficacy; but I suspect that, if you want military money, you'd do much better by developing weapons that they will be able to use without excessive diplomatic trouble. Drones, precision munitions, vehicles that can't be destroyed by explosively formed penetrators that can be fabricated by anybody with a supply of ammonium nitrate and metal forming skills somewhere between "early modern blacksmith" and "1850's machine shop", etc.

You aren't thinking it through. There would be no lower limit to the size of an bomb made with stable anti-matter (not to mention what it would do for the propulsion of weapons and military craft).

>...vehicles that can't be destroyed by explosively formed penetrators that> can be fabricated by anybody with a supply of ammonium nitrate and metal> forming skills somewhere between "early modern blacksmith" and "1850's> machine shop", etc.

Unfortunately, as Iran, Afghanistan and North Korea have demonstrated, they ARE stupid enough, and really don't care if they die for Allah or Kim or whoever.

Sorry guy. The only country ever to actually drop the bomb on someone else has been the United States. And as far as the rest of the world is concerned, the US is just as if not more likely than any of the aforementioned basket cases to drop one again. All it would probably take is another relatively minor terrorist outrage.

Sorry guy. The only country ever to actually drop the bomb on someone else has been the United States. And as far as the rest of the world is concerned, the US is just as if not more likely than any of the aforementioned basket cases to drop one again. All it would probably take is another relatively minor terrorist outrage.

I know it's really fun to wave your hands in the air and yell about how the US is the only country that has ever used a nuclear bomb offensively, but it just makes you look like a goober.

The truth is that the nuclear bombs used on Japan were nothing like later bombs. The highest estimated yield for the Fat Man is 22kt, while Tsar Bomba is 50,000kt, or about 23,000 times the power. Please go educate yourself:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapon_yield [wikipedia.org]

1) Just because MAD is not applicable to today's circumstances, does not make it a naive theory. It did exactly its job in the circumstances for which it was created.

2) If you write off Iran, Afghanistan and North Korea as "stupid", then you are a fool. Yes, their motivations differ from yours - enough so that you clearly do not understand them. However, you're claim that they're suicidal needs some support.

Don't forget the other affliction of old guys. Two things that will always be money makers. Helping old guys kill young dudes from other countries, and returning life to those old guys dead boners. The graveyard and the bone zone, you'll never go broke setting up shop there.

I guess to me it's strongly correlated with how universal in space and time the results are. It's fairly easy to do science which is good science as such, but just either very constricted, navel gazing or void of any fundamental insights. Of course case studies are to the soft sciences what experiments are to the hard sciences, but I don't see how studying ancient Egyptians will ever yield anything significant outside the field of ancient Egyptians. Understanding the fundamental particles and forces of the

"Outside of people informed enough to oppose particular scientific projects as being ill-conceived compared to other ones, support for, or opposition to, research projects is pretty much an ideological matter. People who support science as an end will be dissuaded only by the most grindingly uninteresting streaks of purely negative results. People who oppose it(or who rank it very low compared to other ends) will be appeased by only res

Not theorized, demonstrated. We can easily achieve electroweak unification energies in the accelerators. It's a known thing.

The "unification" of the electric and magnetic force is a different type of unification from electroweak. There truly is just one force, the electromagnetic, which seems to split into two forces because of relativity. The unification of the other forces is of an inherently different kind.

The electric and magnetic forces are both mediated by the same particle -- the photon. This literal

IAAP and I wince every time I hear that moronic name for the Higgs. Probably a funding trick or some in-joke. Old physicists turning to religion when they feel their mind turning to mush in their twilight years is a sad end to otherwise illustrious careers (and not altogether implausible as a reason for this ridiculous name).

Or perhaps it's because it's the explanation that accounts for everything of substance in the universe (aka mass), yet has remained hitherto unseen.

Sorta like a religious explanation of god, don't you think? God is a divine being responsible for the entire universe, yet nobody has seen him. Higgs boson is responsible for all the mass in the universe, yet nobody has seen it. Sounds like a "God particle" to me, especially since it's the lynch-pin for the existence of all matter in the universe.

Irrelevantist, more than anti. And I cringed (incorrectly - see later) mostly because of what that said about the scientist who named it (again, incorrectly). But that's neither here nor there, you see. Courtesy of a poster further down this thread, it turns out that Leon Lederman originally called it the "goddamn particle" (presumably because of how difficult it was to look for). His editor changed it to the "god particle" for obvious reasons. [source] [guardian.co.uk]

I remember hearing the theory that just as we get close to figuring out the universe, it instantly morphs into something more complex and confusing. Personally, it's the best explanation yet into how the universe works.

Well, they were making a bet that they'd either need the additional power or that they'd get there first eliminating things more quickly. The problem though was that there wasn't any definitive evidence that they needed the extra power and the technology was sufficiently advanced that they screwed up in a few places, giving the guys over in the US the chance to keep plugging away at it. Since technically speaking the Higgs Boson still hasn't been found, the LHC still might do it, but they've lost a lot of t

To be fair, they didn't actually "find" any Higgs-boson particles. They found "a one percent difference between the production of pairs of muons and pairs of antimuons in the decay of B mesons produced in high-energy collisions." And I started digging through wikipedia and some really hairy PDFs to find out why that matters and then my head exploded. Did you know muon's can displace electrons? Or that they can actually take an electron and create an element called muonium, that is effectively really light (1/9th mass) hydrogen, for a fraction of a second? Fuck, man. I hate my job, why can't I do that?

Anyway, from the Symmetry write up:

While the Tevatron can perform these indirect searches, it is too early to tell yet if the Higgs bosons would have masses the Tevatron can detect or would only be within reach of the higher-energy LHC.

Thank you! It's nice to know that a scientist did not come up with this name (as I idly speculated somewhere else on this page). Unfortunately, (as in this case), it only takes a bit of time before a snarky name or an in-joke is taken seriously by enough people that a whole "well scientists are looking for god too" movement builds up.

Well, that makes more sense for 5 particles. I could accept a trinity of God particles - Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but not 5. I guess this way we can name the two negative Higgs' "Lucifer" and "Beelzebub".

ok, what with genetics, medicine, computer, cell, and other technological discoveries and advances being dominated by the US, we're supposed to think physics might be in that group too? But what about all the slashdot articles that say science in the US is dead? [slashdot.org] Obviously there has been a mistake. If the US isn't dominating everything, then there is cause for alarm and we must all get upset and stuff. And obviously the US is just failing in science and technology. Raise our fists in anger! America, Fa

It's fun to observe from the periphery - this result, the recent confirmation (maybe) that neutrinos have mass (otherwise they couldn't interconvert among their three types)...more and more cracks are appearing in the Standard Model. It's exciting.
And probably the answer is 42.

Simply because you or I cannot find an immediate use for something does not mean that it is not useful. Who knows, in 15 years, knowledge gained through these experiments could lead to a better method of harvesting energy from some unknown source, or coming up with a better means of propulsion or medicine for a problem that we thought was mundane (subatomic cure for the common cold? who knows).

It is for this reason that science should be pursued so that when someone infinitely smarter than you combines this bit of knowledge with another bit, mankind sees a tangible benefit.

Simply because you or I cannot find an immediate use for something does not mean that it is not useful. Who knows, in 15 years, knowledge gained through these experiments could lead to a better method of harvesting energy from some unknown source, or coming up with a better means of propulsion or medicine for a problem that we thought was mundane (subatomic cure for the common cold? who knows).

It is for this reason that science should be pursued so that when someone infinitely smarter than you combines this bit of knowledge with another bit, mankind sees a tangible benefit.

The flaw with this reasoning is that we have all sorts of interesting possible research. It isn't expensive super collider vs no research it is 10 billion dollars used for building a super collider vs 10 billion spent on other research.

The flaw with this reasoning is that we have all sorts of interesting possible research. It isn't expensive super collider vs no research it is 10 billion dollars used for building a super collider vs 10 billion spent on other research.

I guess that Gauss et al. should not have wasted their time on pure mathematics fields (such as number theory) that had absolutely no practical applications at the time.

I guess that Gauss et al. should not have wasted their time on pure mathematics fields (such as number theory) that had absolutely no practical applications at the time.

I'm sure someone wasted their time on pure mathematics fields that had absolutely no practical applications at the time. Gauss wasn't one of those people. He wasted his time on fields, including pure mathematical fields, that had considerable application then and now. For example, his experience with number theory carried over to make a computation for the position of Ceres that was vastly simpler than existing methods and which since has become the "least squares method", one of the fundamental computing t

I believe the GP is arguing about the lost opportunity of that $10 billion. There is a finite pool of cash, and many other projects that are asking for funding. Something else got the axe so the super collider could get built... given the light of the debt crises in the western nations, maybe that cash would have been better spent later rather than right now.

Fair enough, let's address those claims.

The construction of LHC was approved in 1995, way before there was a crisis in Europe. The total project cost (about half of the $10B figure according to this [web.cern.ch]) is therefore spread across more than 15 years (assuming not all experiments have been run) and 20 countries [wikipedia.org]. CERN's budget for last year was about $1B (see previous link) and a similar figure in 2008 and I fully expect them to spend that money on nuclear research, as per their charter; there are other organizations that concern themselves with world hunger, bank bailouts, etc.

Now, let's put the numbers into perspective.There are *individuals* [forbes.com] that can finance the LHC 5 times over. Speaking about countries, in 2009 Germany was the largest contributor to CERN with ~$200M, which was roughly 0.006% of their GDP [imf.org].

Oh, and by the way, the discovery was made at Fermilab's Tevatron, which is both older and significantly cheaper than the LHC.

If we are going to get time travel out of it we would already be neck deep in time travelers and it would be impossible to get tickets to the world cup. Neither of those things is happening so this result will not give us time travel.

If we are going to get time travel out of it we would already be neck deep in time travelers and it would be impossible to get tickets to the world cup. Neither of those things is happening so this result will not give us time travel.

Perhaps we're already knee deep in them and don't even know it. They're probably really good at creating identities for themselves, and if they ever fuck up, they could go back and fix it. Or perhaps this period in time is considered to be a pretty shitty time to come back to, so they don't bother?

This is great and all, but does this mean we'll finally get some great new technologies like artificial gravity, FTL propulsion or communication, quantum-fluctuation energy, or interdimensional travel?

We're still getting new technologies out of the strange sub-atomic stuff others started discovering c. 120 years ago.

Proton, Neutron, Electron. Have we come up with any new technologies out of any sub-atomic particles since then?

Personally, I find this fascinating. Especially if it means the Standard Model has to be revised (again!), since you can never tell what you're going to get when the theory has to be scrapped....

Understanding the quantum mechanical behavior of electrons has been very significant in modern semiconductor design and fabrication. A lot of pure research into subatomic particles has contributed to the

Positrons [wikipedia.org]. It's not that the rest aren't useful (for analogous uses - essentially as probes of structure. Think of any field where physical structure needs to be probed. Then think of exotic particles as more useful probes that can replace light or that can probe more exotic properties of matter (like spin)). It's just that miniaturizing collider technology or getting otherwise practical sources for these particles is a major PITA. The day that happens is the day we can all have ghostbusters-style proton pa

When Einstein wrote about the stimulated emission of light in 1917 (The paper is called "Zur Quantentheorie der Strahlung"), there was (a) no example of it known in nature (still isn't, I think) (b) no known way to produce it and (c) no known application. Welcome to LaserFest [laserfest.org]

I apologize in advance for my ignorant questions, but you seem like you might know the answers and be able to break it down for a layman like myself.

First, how did Einstein postulate the existence of stimulated emission of light? Did he have some type of lab where he did experiments leading him to this conclusion, or is it all purely mathematical?

Second, who figured out how to produce it, and how?

As an engineer, this is the part I'm most interested in in this subject area: getting from some theorized effect in physics to being able to create and control this effect at will, and then coming up with useful applications for it. Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems like schools gloss over all this stuff; they talk about Einstein coming up with E=mc^2, briefly mention some guys working on the Manhattan Project, and boom, next thing you know there's atomic bombs exploding.

I wonder what other interesting properties in physics have been written about, perhaps even verified experimentally, but no one's yet devised a way to harness them.

Einstein was purely a theoretical physicist. He knew the state of the current experiments (Young's, various astronomical observations), and the state of the current math (specifically Maxwell and Boltzman). Beyond that, he managed to figure out brilliant thought experiments that pointed his math in the right direction, and was able to work with new interpretations of existing phenomena (such as his statistical interpretation of light phenomena). Actual lasers were first demonstrated in 1960.

The reasons schools gloss over the engineering aspect are that it takes a very long time, a lot of people and a lot of tedious, small increments to go from a new physical effect to a working application. There's very little to be consistently learned about the engineering process that isn't already known.

As for an interesting property that hasn't found an application: quantum entanglement. Yeah, we're kinda seeing baby steps, but consider how long people have been working on it, and how many supposed breakthroughs we've had. There isn't a gadget you can buy at radioshack that uses this.

As for an interesting property that hasn't found an application: quantum entanglement.

I don't think this is quite correct. Many applications involving cryptography and secure communications have been thought of for this, from what I've read about it. Getting it working is another matter. Some have even thought of using it for FTL communications (but I don't know if the phenomenon is actually FTL or not).

It seems to me the applications shouldn't be that difficult to dream up. Of course, hindsight is 20-2

It is, that's what makes it cool. When particles are entangled, if you move one the other moves with no outside influence - the action is instantaneous and distance doesn't matter. The hard part right now is keeping them entangled at a distance - the further apart you move the particles the harder it is to keep them from losing their entanglement. So long as they are actually entangled, though, distance doesn't introduce any kind of delay in the reaction of one particle to another. If they could get it

I personally think understanding how/why mass exists is going to do a lot in the area of energy at first, and if it opens up a more correct theory of physics the sky is the limit really. There is no telling what it might do for us.

I've believed for some time that understanding the true nature of gravity would be revolutionary, and possibly allow such things as FTL propulsion and artificial gravity and other Star Trek-type things needed for deep-space travel. I guess the same would go for mass, as the two a

When particles are entangled, if you move one the other moves with no outside influence - the action is instantaneous and distance doesn't matter.

No -- if you move one particle, the other doesn't move instantly. Entanglement is much more subtle than that; in fact, it's hard to explain what exactly is shared between the particles without using math. One point is important, though: it's not possible to send information faster than light using quantum entanglement. So, all that talk about "instantaneous" reaction is a little misleading.

The hard part right now is keeping them entangled at a distance - the further apart you move the particles the harder it is to keep them from losing their entanglement.

The difficulty in maintaining (quantum) coherence has nothing to do with the distance between the particles. It's just that the particles must be kept completely isolated from everything else -- any interaction with anything else breaks the entanglement.

So long as they are actually entangled, though, distance doesn't introduce any kind of delay in the reaction of one particle to another.

Well, sure, for a suitable definition of "reaction". And remember it's a one time deal: once you interact with one of the particles, the other one suffers the "reaction" and then the entanglement is broken.

If they could get it to work across the world it would be phenomenal, but so far they've only managed a few feet.

Actually, it has been done over a few kilometers, see for example this paper [arxiv.org].

First, how did Einstein postulate the existence of stimulated emission of light? Did he have some type of lab where he did experiments leading him to this conclusion, or is it all purely mathematical?

Perhaps it was just a "hunch".

Do you know why Kepler thought the Sun had to be at the centre of the solar system, and what he kept working at his planetary model until he got the math to work? He believe that the physical order followed the divine order: that God, as the source of all Truth and Light, was orbited by all other entities. The Sun, as the source of light in our realm of reality, therefore had to be orbited by all the entities in the sky:

As he indicated in the title, Kepler thought he had revealed God’s geometrical plan for the universe. Much of Kepler’s enthusiasm for the Copernican system stemmed from his theological convictions about the connection between the physical and the spiritual; the universe itself was an image of God, with the Sun corresponding to the Father, the stellar sphere to the Son, and the intervening space between to the Holy Spirit. His first manuscript of Mysterium contained an extensive chapter reconciling heliocentrism with biblical passages that seemed to support geocentrism.[15]

I'm not a historian of science, but my understanding is that it was purely mathematical -- invented before the relevant quantum mechanics was known. As my undergrad QM text (Griffiths, p 356) says, "Einstein was forced to 'invent' stimulated emission in order to reproduce Plank's formula [wikipedia.org]." I believe he justified it with a fairly abstract thermodynamics argument (he didn't identify a mechanism, he just showed it had to be true or else thermodynamics would be violated). Sorry that I can't cite sources -- I do

Mods: granted this is off-topic, but I'd like to indulge the parent post's questions. I am a biophysicist.

Let me have a stab at explaining the history of stimulated emission and lasers.

Einstein predicted stimulated emission based just on two things: the fact that atoms can absorb light and the fact that thermodynamically, as you approach infinite temperature all possible arrangements of particles become equally likely. Consider a collection of atoms that have a ground and an excited state. As temperature (and black-body radiation) increases, more and more photons will pump atoms into the excited state. Excited states naturally decay after a certain lifetime, but without stimulated emission, at higher temperatures more and more atoms would get pumped into the excited state, until an arbitrarily large fraction of atoms would be in the excited state at arbitrarily high temperature. However, from thermodynamics we know that as you approach arbitrarily high temperature there will be a 50/50 mix of ground state and excited atoms, since high temperature favors disorder (entropy) and 50/50 mixes are maximally disordered. Therefore, there must be a process whose rate is proportional to the intensity of the thermal radiation in the system that takes an atom from the excited to the ground state; this is stimulated emission.

Different people give credit to different inventors of the laser, but you can make a good case for Charles Townes' input being timely and critical. He figured out that putting a gain medium (a material with population inversion - more atoms in the excited than the ground state) in an optical resonator would produce coherent light through stimulated emission. He turns 95 next month, and is still going strong last I heard.

If you're interested in a very well written history of early nuclear physics and the atomic bomb, I'd highly recommend Richard Rhodes book The Making of the Atomic Bomb [wikipedia.org]. It does a phenomenal job of covering the theory, experiments and engineering involved in big chunk of nuclear research. It is very well written and has compelling mini-biographies of several of the scientists. No Einstein lasers though.

What is it about a particle that makes it have a particular charge? What is charge fundamentally? Are these known things or just stupid questions on my part? It seems to me if two particles can be different (positive or negative) then they must consist of something smaller that makes them that way.

Not stupid at all. The whole idea of a "particle" is kind of misleading. What is really going on at this scale (quantum field theory) is far more terrifying and mind bending that basic quantum mechanics (which is by itself very disturbing).

To simplify it slightly (or a whole lot actually), there are fundamental fields (like the electric and magnetic fields, for instance) which which have some associated energy density. Fields can also interact, (that is, if the fields are both nonzero at some point, there is additional energy due to them both being nonzero).

This is all fine and dandy (no particles yet). What we have described is classical field theory. Once we quantize these fields (i.e.,bring in the quantum in QFT) the discrete steps these fields can take on become the "particles." The interactions between the fields become the force carriers, etc. These notions of "charge" correspond to how the fields couple.

"Elementary particle" has always meant that it was a particle that was not composed of smaller ones. It was fundamental, in a sense. As far as we know, electrons and photons are examples of elementary particles; they aren't composed of any smaller stuff. We used to think protons and neutrons were elementary, but now we know they're made of quarks. We think quarks are elementary.

In between those two periods, collider experiments had shown over four hundred different particles.

there is this interesting feature of human nature where if you don't have tangible experience with something yourself the concept must either be wrong or not exist in the first place. "I don't understand the science behind quantum physics / global warmning / whatever and haven't heard a plausible car analogy to explain it, therefore all the scientists have made a big mistake and doesn't exist." the arrogance of introspective existence or something. or maybe ju

the arrogance of introspective existence or something. or maybe just a lack of empathy.

Or maybe just the lack of science education. I took a college-level chemistry class recently. It kicked my ass, but it was worth it. When you can sit down with a piece of paper and a pencil and predict the results of some experiment mathematically, then go into a lab, perform the experiment, and see your results proven correct, you really get a feeling for, "Hey, maybe they really aren't just making all this shit up."

Unfortunately, not many people today are given this experience/forced to have this experience.

Actually as far as I know the Higgs field doesn't help say anything about actual gravitation, whether passive (inertia) or active (causing space-time warping), since the Standard Model has no gravitation in it. It's more something which defines the relationships of rest masses of particles.

The actual particle physics of gravitation could be something else entirely.